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The idea is as audacious as it is preposterous, which is what makes Bawaal worth a look. The promo had intrigued viewers– what is the World War II connection with a family drama?
Nitesh Tiwari working with a story by Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, equates a man’s coming of age with lessons learnt (or maybe not) from history. Ajay (Varun Dhawan), popularly known as Ajju Bhaiyya is a history teacher in a Lucknow school, popular not for his teaching (abysmal), but for the flamboyant image he has created for himself. He may not know much about the Nazi era, but he has inadvertently absorbed the Goebbelian dictum about a lie repeated often enough becoming the truth. So, all the self-aggrandizing yarns he has told about himself have made him a hero in his mohalla. Only his parents (Manoj Pahwa-Anjuman Saxena) know what a good-for-nothing wastrel he really is.
To enhance is image further, he marries the rich and pretty Nisha (Jahnvi Kapoor), but she has a health condition, which makes him treat her with deplorable indifference. There is no reason for Nisha to put up with his mistreatment, but the hope that he will change. Or perhaps she believes herself to be “defected goods” as he calls her.
In danger of being suspended for slapping a legislator’s son, Ajay comes up with the crazy idea of going on a WW-II pilgrimage and showing students, via video, what happened back then. He actually spends about five years’ worth of his salary to save a job! And because there was a big budget available to make the film, the history portion is WW-ll, which takes the estranged couple to Europe, instead of, say, the Partition Museum in Punjab, for some national history.
Ignorant and out of his depth away from his usual playing ground, Ajay has to depend on the well-travelled and better educated Nisha for everything from information to food. His learning to appreciate her is understandable; her not rejecting him for the selfish boor that he is, remains puzzling. The film, at its core, is traditional, believing it to be the woman’s duty to reform the man, at the cost of her own self respect.
The WW-ll tourism takes Ajay and Nisha to Paris, Normandy, Amsterdam, Berlin and Poland, and Tiwari recreates in black-and-white some scenes from that era, though the information he imparts to his eager students back home could have been managed by screening a few well-made Hollywood movies. And what he learns about decency and responsibility, from any ‘sanskari‘ Bollywood social film.
A weird concept without the added attraction of memorable music, Bawaal has to depend on the two stars on whom the entire film is focussed, and they do their bit adequately– if they lack chemistry, it works for this plot. Luckily for them the film is released on OTT (Amazon Prime), so viewers will be more accepting of such an experiment than they might have been in a moviehall.
Bawaal
Directed by Nitesh Tiwari
Cast: Varun Dhawan, Jahnavi Kapoor and others
On Amazon Prime
